ASS styling is not understood by simple players, and it is lost when converting to plain formats. SMI can carry several languages in one file for the players that read it. ASS is at home in anime and karaoke subtitles with fonts, colours and positioning; SMI is the usual choice for subtitles for Korean-market players and multilingual files.
The text is read as UTF-8 or UTF-16, whichever the file is. An older file in another code page is read using the charset it declares, or as Windows-1252 if it declares none, so accented letters in an unlabelled legacy file can come out wrong. A file that is not text, such as the picture-based subtitles of a DVD, is refused instead of being converted to nonsense. Of the styling, only italic, bold, underline and the position on screen (top, middle or bottom, left, centre or right) travel between formats; fonts, colours, outlines and effects do not. Each line takes its italic, bold, underline and alignment from its style and from override tags; drawing commands and karaoke effects are ignored. The file is written with one language class, and cues that overlap in time are shown together, as SAMI has a single timeline.